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Dr Rosie Ramsden

Dr Rosie Ramsden

  • Position: Montague Burton Research & Teaching Fellow in Jewish Studies
  • Areas of expertise: Holocaust testimony and representation; queer and feminist theory; gender studies; queer history and women's history; contemporary literature; cultural memory of the Holocaust.
  • Email: R.Ramsden@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 5277
  • Location: 1:16
  • Website: Twitter

Profile

In September 2021 I joined the school as the Montague Burton Research and Teaching Fellow in Jewish Studies, and in this role I am active as a member of the school’s Centre for Jewish Studies. Prior to joining the school I completed a funded PhD in history at Northumbria University. 

I am currently working on women’s published, English-language testimonies and oral testimonies of the Holocaust. I also have a longstanding interest in queer histories of the Holocaust, as well as women’s gendered experiences, recall and representation of the Holocaust. 

Publications

  • Ramsden, Roseanna, ‘“Waging War Against the Parasites”: Critiquing Women’s Narrative Identities through Feminist Ecocritical Reflections on Women and the Holocaust’, Women’s History Review (November, 2020), 1 – 20. DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2020.1828287
  • Ramsden, Roseanna, ‘“Something Was Crawling All Over Me”: Queer Fear in Women’s Holocaust Testimonies’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 26:3 (2020), 401 – 415.  DOI: 10.1080/17504902.2019.1634357

Research interests

I am currently working on my first monograph, entitled Rereading Women’s Holocaust Testimonies Against the Grain: Gendered Narratives, Representation and Identity. This monograph focusses on women’s gendered representations of the Shoah. It considers – and pays close critical attention to – the silent areas of women’s experiences and testimonies that are missed when our study of women and the Holocaust characterises women using the categories of mother, sister, caregiver and nurturer. In particular, using gender, feminist, queer and ecocritical theory as hermeneutic tools with which to reread women’s memoirs ‘against the grain’ of traditional Holocaust discourses, it explicitly engages with, and gives the space of analysis to, representations that have thus far remained exluded from the written historical narrative. I am also currently writing a second article about representations of queer relationships in survivor testimony. 

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD in History (Northumbria University)
  • MA English Literature (University of Leeds)
  • B.A. English Language & Literature (University of Leeds)

Professional memberships

  • British Association for Holocaust Studies
  • Women's History Network